"There is nothing whatever the matter with me," Rent said moodily. "I feel as well and fit for work as you do. Since I have been up I have thought out a whole train of new experiments. I remember all that happened to a certain point, and then for a few days everything is blank. There is something I ought to do, something that I have left undone which I dare not neglect any longer. If I could only think of it! Oh, if I could only think of it, what a relief it would be!"
The words came from Rent in a tone of positive anguish. He paced up and down the room with his hands locked behind his back. Ethel could see how drawn and contracted his brows were. Beads of perspiration stood on his forehead, his lips quivered, his whole body shook.
"You must try to put it out of your mind," the girl said. "You cannot hope to get better as long as you distress yourself in this fashion. And, besides, I don't suppose it is of any importance. If it is business, somebody is bound to remind you sooner or later."
Rent laughed in a hollow fashion.
"Oh, it isn't business," he explained. "It is worse than that. It is something that I am desperately afraid of, though I can't tell why. Do you know what I feel like?"
The speaker paused abruptly in his walk and came to a standstill in front of Ethel. He grasped her hands in his and pressed them with a certain passion which filled her with pain.
"I feel like a man who has committed murder," he said. "I am like one who has made away with a fellow-creature and hidden the body hurriedly till I could find time to dispose of it. It is like some hideous nightmare, some chapter from a weird novel. Imagine a man who has killed a fellow-creature. Imagine that nobody knows who this fellow-creature is. Try to think of a person who, once got rid of, no one would be any the wiser for the loss. You may say the woman came to my house late at night, if you like, after everybody had gone to bed.... And then she dies and is laid in a quiet spot, which is not so quiet but that people go there sometimes. The murderer dare not proceed further at present, but in the morning he promises himself that he will sink the body in a deep pool and then he will have no more anxiety on the matter. And when he wakes up on the morrow he has forgotten what he has done with the body. Don't laugh at me."
"I am not," Ethel said, trembling from head to foot with a fear she could not repress. "I swear I am not laughing at you. But why let your mind dwell upon such morbid subjects? You are the last man in the world who is likely to be mixed up in a terrible thing like that. Try to compose yourself."
But Rent was not to be turned so lightly aside.
"I don't know," he said. "There are thousands of cases on record of sudden lapses of memory. Haven't you read of people whose minds suddenly become blank as they are walking along the street? Why, I am a case in point. What is the meaning of this extraordinary lapse? And why do I feel this hideous impulse to go out and hide something? Why am I haunted by the terror that I have brought myself within reach of the law? Oh, the whole thing is ghastly, almost unbearable."